Profiling bare-metal cores in AMP systems

In this paper we describe OProfileBM, an extension to the sampling-based Linux system profiler OProfile. It enables cheap and easy to use performance analysis on multi-core platforms operated using asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP). OProfileBM is linked to standalone applications that run on bare-metal cores without an operating system, and collects samples in the background, while the application is running. The collected data is then transferred to an OProfile instance running on Linux for further analysis. OProfileBM integrates seamlessly with the existing OProfile frontend.